My father shook his head. “Izzy wrote all this with a sense of wonder, at what we are doing to each other, to ourselves, how people can be creative and cunning to the end, how we differ and yet are all the same, how willing we are to be misled by the poetics of the war, of death, of the impossibility of escape from the horror.” He wiped his lips with his napkin. “Of course I’m keeping her letters. Don’t tell her, though; if she gets wind that we think she’s worth publishing, she’ll change, and we’ll make her self-conscious and kill her spirit. It’s her unselfconsciousness that is so attractive. We don’t want to give her any complexes—not where she is, on the edge of danger.”
He had finished—wolfed—his chicken. He placed his knife and fork together and wrapped his fingers around his brandy glass. “Speaking of complexes, or complicated situations, it’s your turn. No ducking now. What are your living arrangements? Are you living with someone?”
I told him. I told him about Sam, about Will, about Lottie and Faye, about Whisky. I said that Sam had lost touch with Will’s father, who was at the Front. I didn’t say who Will’s father was, what his nationality was, and I didn’t say anything about Faye’s bereavement and outburst.
He heard me out in silence. When I had finished, he moved his jaw to one side and said, “So it’s as we thought. You are living in sin.” He shook his head. “You are pretending to be married with someone whose man could come back at any time and reclaim what’s his. Forget for the moment whether what you are doing is right, is moral. Is it wise? Do you love this woman? If you do, you could get very hurt.” He shook his head again. “It’s messy emotionally, Hal. And it’s—well, it’s hardly tidy, or clean, morally, is it?”
He looked at me for quite some time without either of us speaking. “Did your mother and I do something wrong, make some terrible mistake, bringing you up? I’m shocked and I’m disappointed. To be quite frank, Hal, I’m appalled—I can’t deny it. I won’t deny it. It’s not at all what your mother and I had in mind for you.”
His features were set in an icy glare.
“But I’m content, Dad. Happy. Very happy.” In for a penny, in for a pound—I banged on, defending myself, making my own case. “It makes a kind of biological sense, too—you can see that, can’t you? I don’t think you should tell Ma, though. She sounds as though she’s got enough to worry about, without a little bastard in the family.”
He winced at my use of that word and nodded glumly. “At least you’re not lonely. We were worried, both of us, that you would be … well, solitary in London.”
I grinned. “No chance of that. The job is hard—long hours, anyway—and Sam has three sisters. There are always people coming and going at the flat—it’s known as Gare Montgomery.”
He almost smiled.
I think he was in part relieved that I hadn’t become some sort of freak because of my sexual predicament, and in part disappointed, too, that I hadn’t met a girl from a “good” family. Had Sam been a university lecturer, say, rather than a schoolteacher, he would have been far happier.
“I won’t tell your mother just yet,” he said. “You’re right about that. Let’s see what this other doctor has to say and we’ll go on from there.”
I nodded. Though they had been distant, I had always got on with my parents, and I wanted their good opinion.
But I wanted Sam more.
With Faye gone, the flat was a good bit quieter, emptier, less unpredictable than it had been. I thought I’d be pleased—and I was pleased that the odious Cyril was out of our lives—but I found that, if I didn’t so much miss Faye herself, and her tempers, I did miss the extra level of busyness, of noise, bustle, and, yes, chaos that she had brought with her. Since she had been gone, Penrith Mansions was a little less of a railway station.
Sam felt differently. The arguments and shouting matches about Will’s paternity had upset and wearied her, mainly because, I think, she realized that it would always be an issue among those who knew. Lottie never said anything, at least not to me, but she offered herself more often than usual for babysitting duty. On those evenings she still avidly buried herself in her books and magazines on the weddings and parties and affairs of the aristocracy. In my presence she never behaved as if Will were anything other than 100 percent British.
A few days after Faye had left, however, Sam tackled me. It was a Saturday, early evening, and the three of us—Sam, Will, and me— were visiting a fair in Battersea Park. There were about three of these fairs a year and we all loved going. They were, truth to tell, a bit tacky but they were a change from our normal routine, and Will—especially, naturally—was entranced by the bright lights, the music, the smells of candy floss, fried food, and the sheer exoticism of the occasion.
I had to keep my eyes open for him. He was as curious—as brave—as ever. If he could, he would walk—stumble—right up to machinery and peer in, oblivious to danger, poking his fingers where they shouldn’t be poked, grabbing chains that shouldn’t be grabbed, gurgling away triumphantly when we dragged him out of danger. He knew he’d gone too far and got away with it.
Halfway through the evening—it must have been eight-thirty, long past Will’s bedtime (as he well knew, but kept very quiet about)—I bought him some candy floss. We were both standing there, our cheeks covered in laces of colored spun sugar, when Sam suddenly whispered, so that Will couldn’t hear, “We’ve never really talked about it, have we—Will’s father being German, I mean? Except that first day, in the rain, in Middle Hill. You didn’t even say much when we had to walk through those placards outside the Bechstein Hall. Do you think I was wrong to do what I did?”
Faye’s outburst was preying on her mind.
It wasn’t easy replying, with so much sugar lace in my mouth, but I was grateful for it as a delaying device. This was not a subject I wanted to discuss. I made a show of chewing and swallowing.
“Sam, please. After your sisters, I am the first person you told about Wilhelm. Did I let it stand in the way then? Don’t make yourself all… all upset about it. Have some candy floss.”
But she wouldn’t let it drop. She picked up Will.
“Why can’t Faye see that it happened before the war. Wilhelm wasn’t the enemy then! I mean, it couldn’t have happened after war broke out. He had a brother and always wanted a sister, just as we sisters always wondered what having a brother would have been like. He said he was very competitive with his brother, whereas competition, although it was there, was always muted between us sisters. At school Wilhelm’s brother got better marks, but Wilhelm was better at sport. Faye couldn’t see—wouldn’t see, nobody can see—that Germans are just like us.” She made a sound, somewhere between a groan and a sigh. “I hate it that she’s gone and… well, that we’ve lost touch.” She bit her lip. “But what she said to you was unforgivable and ungrateful.”
“Well, she has gone,” I said. “And taken the awful Cyril with her. Look on the positive side.”
Sam wouldn’t be comforted. “They can tell other people. That would be …”
“Who are you worried about?”
“Well, Hal, you work in a sensitive job.”
I stepped forward and kissed her cheek, even though we were in public, even though my lips were sticky with candy floss. “Maybe I shouldn’t say this,” I whispered, “but I think I’ve done enough in my job to prove my worth, to show I’m not a spy or a German sympathizer or anything like that. But this is silly, Sam. The people I work with wouldn’t care, if they knew. The people I work with are rationalists.”
“Well, the people I work with are not!”
I was stunned.
She turned and started walking back in the direction of the flat. But the crowds were thick—it was Saturday night, after all—and I soon caught up with her.
“What is it?” I said. “What’s happened at school?”
She bit her lip again. “Nothing. Nothing really. It’s just that— well, one day last week, in the staff room, some of the other teachers
were talking and one woman said that a child in her class had just had his father killed, at the Front, with her mother pregnant. She said that the child’s family didn’t know how they were going to survive—they were a family of three children, soon to be four, with no breadwinner now. That started everybody off. Oh, Hal, everyone was so anti-German, so vitriolic.”
She put Will back on the ground and held his hand as we fought our way through the evening crowds. “I met Wilhelm at a fair like this—just like this,” she said, straightening up. “We were standing next to each other, shooting pellets at something, and we got talking, laughing at how hopeless we were. It was the most natural thing in the world—or that’s how it seemed then. Now,” she sighed, “it’s beginning to be a burden, the most unnatural thing I’ve ever done, falling in love. I know that the teachers at school… if they were told the truth … I’d be shunned, and out of a job in no time.”
I took Sam’s hand and led both her and Will to a quiet patch of ground away from the main walkway.
“Look,” I said, brushing her cheek with my fingers. “The problem is with you, in your head, here.” I tapped her temple with my finger. “Maybe you’ve still got some loyalty to Wilhelm—I don’t know. Something that stops you from moving forward. But you’re wrong to let Faye’s behavior shape your life and Will’s happiness. I don’t know if you love me any more than you did when we left Middle Hill—I’ve deliberately not asked, so as not to burden you, as you say.”
I touched her face again.
“But my feelings about you haven’t changed, not one bit. If anything, they have grown. When you are ready, all we need to do is get married, quietly, and have Will christened; then you can change to another school, where you can tell everyone that I am Will’s father.”
“You’d still do that?”
“You know I would.”
“But even at a new school I’d still overhear those conversations … I’d still feel the burden.”
I let a short silence elapse. “Then it seems to me that you still can’t let go of Wilhelm.”
We walked home in silence.
In Middle Hill, that evening in the cricket field, the next morning at the railway station, it hadn’t mattered that Sam didn’t love me. If I was really honest with myself, that was no longer true. I still couldn’t hate Wilhelm, but how convenient it would be if he were dead.
My new team at work consisted of Alan Brewster, a mathematician, brilliant but nearsighted, which banned him from active duty; Eve Palmer, an attractive (if vampish) forty-year-old actress who had worked in Munich—in a variety of cabaret roles—and had escaped just in time; and Genevieve Afton, the shy, blue-stockinged daughter of an earl.
At first, this new group was sticky. The relationship between the two women on the team—one flashy and worldly (and a little sarcastic), the other shy and academic—was tense, but I didn’t have time to dwell on it, for Genevieve straightaway came up with something that kept us occupied.
She spotted that—on successive days, but in different newspapers— something interesting had got through the censors, because it was indirect and didn’t immediately relate to the war effort. She didn’t think anything of it until she came across the second reference that intrigued her. Then she sought me out.
“Look,” she said, showing me an account of a brawl at a dance hall in a place called Bautzen. It was between some soldiers and the local men.
“Yes?” I said.
“I know Bautzen,” she replied quietly. “I was taken there a couple of years ago, just before the war, when my father was invited to shoot by the local Freiherr, or count. It’s not a military town.”
“There’s a war on, Genevieve. Everywhere has been militarized.”
She shook her head. “Look at this.”
It was a page of small ads from an edition of the same paper two days earlier. There was about half a page of notices, many for lodging houses advertising rooms, in several of which the wording specified that soldiers were welcome.
I got the picture.
“You think there is a military buildup in Bautzen, yes?”
She made a face. “I’m new at this. You decide. It’s possible.”
“Hmm. I’m skeptical.” The reality is that I thought the two references too thin to support Genevieve’s interpretation. I had to be careful, though. Bautzen was only thirty miles from the Polish border and if there was a military buildup there, it could signify the beginnings of a major push to the east, an important development in Germany’s war strategy.
To be on the safe side, I shared Genevieve’s ideas with Tom Black, who at that time ran the military table. A small man with a deep, plummy voice, he was incapable of whispering. He heard Genevieve out—and then whistled.
“Jesus, Gen!” he said, showing an informality that I found difficult. “If you’re right, this is big—vee big.” He talked like that.
“Is she right, though?” I still had my doubts.
“Hal, don’t get me wrong, but this is too big for you and me. We’re talking here about a major change in the enemy’s war strategy. It’s your show but if you want my advice, you’ve got to go to Pritchard—and you’ve got to go now. Get this one wrong and we would be letting the side down in a major—a massive—way.”
So we went to Pritchard, all three of us—Genevieve, Tom, and me.
Pritchard was—surprisingly, perhaps—unsympathetic, and he took it out on me.
“Look, Hal, I expect more from you. You are a senior figure here now, and I expect better judgment. These are straws in the wind. You know what it takes for me to pull our people out of somewhere and deploy them someplace else. Yes, I can see that there are more soldiers in Bautzen than before. And maybe Bautzen is a strategically important location—but all that does not mean that the war is about to change course. Now, go away and do some more work and don’t come back until you are convinced you can convince me.” He smiled grimly, tapping his pipe on his desk. “I shall take some convincing.”
Chastened, and in my case not a little irritated that I had let Tom get the better of my better judgment, we returned to our desks. For the next twenty-four hours, Genevieve was shier than ever but, as the days passed, more evidence began to build up. A small ad in the Süd-deutsche Zeítung, the South German Times, announced that a Major Ritter of the Fourth Mecklenburg Field Corps would address the Bautzen (Obergurig) Boys Club. A butcher’s shop announced that the meat ration was being cut—again—this time because bulk supplies were being directed to Camp Briesen, which we found was in a suburb of Bautzen. An ad in the Bautzen paper, for the local theater, suddenly announced that soldiers in uniform would be allowed in at half price. The same local newspaper started to print the emblem of the Fourth Mecklenburg Field Corps alongside its masthead. A school notice announced that the Field Corps Regimental Band would be playing at its concert.
I couldn’t sit on this intelligence any longer.
This second time Pritchard was—to give him credit—more accommodating. But we had lost days without acting. Pritchard said he would see to it that the top brass were informed and that our people on the ground were moved into Bautzen to flesh out the picture.
Progress at last.
There weren’t many similarities between Middle Hill or Warwickshire and London but, as it turned out, canals formed part of the landscape—our landscape—in both places. Because they were largely neglected in London, the canal banks were overgrown with grass and weeds and bushes—even a few trees—which at least made them oases of green and a refuge from the concrete and brick that otherwise dominated the cityscape of the capital. Not many people seemed to share our enthusiasm and, usually, we had the towpath to ourselves.
Will also liked canals. They were different from roads and there was always some sort of wildlife to be seen, as well as barges with interesting loads. Mostly, we saw water rats and moorhens, but there was the occasional duck or otter, sleek in the water but ungainly on land, with large hindquarters.
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br /> On one occasion there was particular excitement when we disturbed a family of rabbits who had quietly been munching on something or other until we came along. Will pointed, gabbled away, and would have given chase had he not been strapped into his pushchair.
“Remember how the children in Middle Hill hated it when you killed those rabbits at the Front?” Sam said, grinning. “I thought some of them were going to cry, right in the middle of your talk.”
“I know,” I said, grinning back. “I think some of them would have lynched me, given half a chance. Better to lose a war than kill some rabbits.”
“Everyone should be so naïve,” said Sam. “Though the children I teach now are not like that. They’ve seen too much…” She sighed. “So many fathers aren’t coming back.”
Silence for a while.
We both knew whom she was thinking of.
“That officer you met, in the Christmas truce… do you ever think of him? Do you ever wonder what has happened to him, where he is now, if he is still alive?”
What was she getting at? Did she suspect? Had she always suspected?
“Yes, I suppose I do think about him, from time to time.” I tried to remain calm, not to make too much of it. “But only in a very general way. Our meeting only lasted a few minutes.”
“Did you like him?”
“Oh, I can’t say, Sam. It was an odd situation—intense, tense— you can see that. We’d been shooting at each other hours before, and would be again, very soon. No one acted normally.”
“Didn’t you swap anything, like others did? I’ve read all about it… buttons, cigarettes …”
What did she know? I was sweating. “We were officers, Sam. To an extent we had to set an example. So cigarettes, yes; buttons no.”
“Where was he from? Remind me.”
What was this, a test? Was she testing me deliberately?
“I can’t remember. Hamburg, I think.”
She shook her head. “Now I remember. You said Berlin last time.”
I was still sweating. “Berlin, that’s right. I forgot. I can’t remember too much about the whole thing.”
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